by Teri Terry
“Before she died, my mother wrote a letter to a friend she had back then,” I say to them. “But I don’t know where to post it. I’ve got his photo here.” I take it out. “Do you know him?”
A few of them peer at it, and if him having red hair like mine raises any suspicions, they keep them to themselves. “That’s the Hamley boy, isn’t it?” one of them says, with a disapproving look on his face. “They moved away, years ago. I don’t know where they got to.”
Another one is listening in. “Didn’t they move down Exeter way after they lost the farm?” He goes to ask someone else, who gets out a phone and makes a call.
He comes over. “My cousin thinks a friend has their number. They’ll ring back if—”
His phone rings. He waves for a pen and paper, writes something down, then hands the paper to me. “There you go. Don’t know the address, but that’s his name—Will Hamley—and his number. Call him if you want to, but be careful. That Hamley lot are nothing but trouble.”
As easy as that. All it took was a lie about a letter. Gran said lying is dangerous, but nothing happened—lightning didn’t crash down, the gates of hell didn’t open at my feet.
Piper has shown me that lying is easy. And it gets you what you want.
We head out for the long walk back in the darkness. I clutch the paper in my hand; my belly churns. Should we call him, this Will Hamley? Suddenly I’m not sure. First, there was Gran’s warning. And nothing but trouble, they said tonight.
But he’s my father.
I give the paper to Zak. “Can you keep it? I’m not sure what I want to do with it.”
He nods and tucks it away in his pocket.
When we finally reach the gate to the house, I pause and turn to look back at the slope above in the moonlight. Wisht Tor is high above us.
And next to the tor: a movement, an outline.
The fox.
The call comes: to hunt!
No . . . No . . . Not again.
But there is no way to stop it. The Wisht Hounds are released, and I’m swept along as one of them. We run free on the moors.
I’m terrified what will come.
I’m exhilarated, too: flying across the dark moors. Not sated by the last kill; never sated. Desperate hunger drives us on.
Arrrroooooo! We howl as one when we catch the sweet scent of prey on the wind.
This prey doesn’t run or bleat in fear as we encircle and trap it. It sleeps, cocooned inside a tent.
First we rip that down.
The prey—two of them, a man and a woman—are awake now and screaming, calling out to their god to save them.
But gods have no power here.
I’m repelled, horrified . . .
Excited. The eyes of the hounds opposite me—horrible, red-rimmed—mirror my own.
We rip out their throats and still their cries.
Beautiful, joyous blood spurts in rhythm—th-thump, th-thump—gradually lessening as their hearts stop beating.
We feast.
Piper
“I’m not sure about this,” Zak says.
“Come on, Zak. You know finding our biological father is what Quinn really wants. She’s just scared.”
“I still think we should have checked with her first and made sure she’s OK with us calling him.”
“Well, apart from Quinn, he’s my father, too. And I want to call him.”
Zak considers what I said, then finally nods. He holds out the piece of paper with the name and number. “Go on, then,” he says.
I move around, trying to find the place on the hill with the best signal. But no matter where I stand, it’s really low—as is my battery. As if to spite me, my phone chooses that moment to power off.
“My phone is dead. Ack . . . ! How do they live here without phones and chargers? I should have charged it when we were at the hotel.”
Zak laughs and takes out his phone. “Try mine?”
The signal on Zak’s phone is just as low, but the battery is marginally better. I dial the number.
It rings once . . . twice . . . three times.
“Hello?” a man’s voice answers.
“Hello, is that Will Hamley?”
“Who wants to know?” Suspicion in his voice.
“I’m Quinn Blackwood.” Zak frowns at me, but I move away. “Isobel Blackwood was my mother.”
“Oh, wow. That’s a blast from the past. How is Izzy?”
Izzy? “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died recently.”
Long pause. “Oh. I see. I’m sorry, too.” His voice is weighed down with sadness. “But why are you calling me?”
“I’d really like to see you to tell you. Can we meet?”
“Tell me now. What is this about?”
“I think . . . well, I’m pretty sure . . . that I’m your daughter.”
The silence is so long, I’m afraid the phone has been disconnected. “Hello?” I say, finally.
“I’m still here.”
“So, can we meet up?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got any money if that’s what you’re after.”
“No. I’ve got plenty of my own.”
He digests that. “Where are you? Still on the moors?”
“Yes. Can we meet at Two Bridges Hotel?”
“S’pose so. If you’re buying.”
“Fine.”
“When?”
“How about tomorrow afternoon? Two p.m.”
Another pause. “Yeah, well, I ain’t got nothing better to do. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Promise me you’ll be there.”
“For what it’s worth, yeah, I promise. I’ll be there.” Then the phone clicks—it’s dead. He’s gone.
I hand the phone back to Zak, and smile. “It’s all sorted,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow. “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”
We walk back down to the house. Quinn was angry with me, and last night I was angry right back at her. How can she not see that we’re in things together?
I had another almost sleepless night. I’ve slept so little since we got to Dartmoor, I wonder why I’m not exhausted. Instead, I’m exhilarated. My mind seems sharper; colors and smells and touch all so heightened and clear that they almost hurt. Everything is turned up a few notches.
When I finally drifted away, then came another of those mad dreams, where I called the hunt and ran with it on the moors. The kill, the feast. If I close my eyes, I’m there again: the power, the blood. I half shudder, half shiver, a tingle going down my tongue and throat just to think of it.
And when I woke up and went out to watch the sunrise again, I realized what I needed to do.
Quinn is doubting me now, because of Gran pointing out my lies. I need to do something to show Quinn I’m on her side—I need to give her something she wants. Something she thinks she wants, anyhow.
Then she will have to give me what I want—she’ll have to stick to her promise to help me find my inheritance.
Quinn
Running on the moors . . . the taste of blood.
I shake my head, trying to dislodge the memory and struggling not to be sick. Those people in that tent. A man and a woman, camping on the moors. I can still hear their screams; still taste their terror, along with their blood.
I’m going crazy.
The front door opens; there are footsteps, voices. Zak and Piper are back from their walk.
Ness runs in, jumps up on the sofa next to me, and licks my face.
“You don’t look like you’ve moved all morning,” Zak says. “Are you—”
A shrill scream from upstairs interrupts him.
“Gran?” I leap off the sofa and run up the stairs, Zak and Piper close behind.
She’s collapsed on the floor of her bedroom, face ashen. I go to help her, but she slaps my hand away.
“I see,” she says, but she’s
not looking at us.
“Zak!” she says, and holds out her hand. He kneels next to her, and she grips his hand tight. “Listen to me, Zak.”
“I’m listening,” he says.
“Leave. Leave this room, this house, the moors. Get in your car and drive far away, and never come back. It’s too late for us, but you can escape the fire.”
“The fire? What fire?” He looks up, shrugs, mouths Do we need an ambulance?
I shake my head.
“I tried to stop it, all those years ago,” Gran says. “I should have known it could never be stopped. What started in fire must end in fire. Go now, Zak. Before it’s too late. Go!” she says, agitated.
Go downstairs, I mouth silently to Zak, and he slips out of the room.
“He’s gone now, Gran,” I say. And Piper and I help her up, into bed. She’s cold, shaking.
“You both know, in here,” she says, and taps her chest. “Even if you don’t know in here.” She taps her head.
“We know what?” Piper says.
“Where it all began, and must end. In fire.”
Gran droops back in bed, her eyes closing. Soon she falls asleep.
We tiptoe out of the room, shut the door.
“Well, that was a major attack of the crazies,” Piper says, but I can tell she is shaken.
“Gran has visions sometimes. They shouldn’t be ignored.”
“That stuff she said about fire . . .” Piper starts to say, hesitant, and doesn’t finish the sentence.
I nod. “You remember the fire, don’t you? When we both had the fever when we were thirteen. I don’t think it was a dream, or a hallucination. I think we were spirit traveling into the past,” I say. The truth is coming in and fusing with what has happened lately and what was then—they were the same sort of experience. And so much I want to ask Piper if she has been dreaming the hunt, too—the sheep, the campers . . . the blood. But I can’t bring myself to do it. If it is just me, it would confirm to her what I’ve always known: that I’m the bad one. I don’t want her to know.
We stare at each other on the stairs. I fancy I can see echoes of the dream that wasn’t a dream from all those years ago in her eyes: the house, the burning. Fury not destroyed, but strengthened.
“That was for real?” Piper whispers, her eyes open wide.
“Yes. It happened close by. The burning place is the ruins in front of the house. They are forbidden to us.”
The three of us are subdued that evening. Zak is nervous that if Gran realizes he’s still here, she’ll flip out again, but he doesn’t believe the rest of it.
He should. He should leave; we should all leave this place behind. But no matter where I go, the darkness will come along inside me. Even if I leave this place, at night the hunt will find me.
I slip upstairs to get Zak’s things; he’d better stay down here with us tonight.
The three of us settle down to sleep.
I sense a movement and open my eyes. Piper is sitting up. “Oh my God, Quinn. Even after all that happened today, I can’t believe I forgot to tell you.”
“You forgot to tell me what?”
“About our biological father. I called him, and he’s coming to Two Bridges tomorrow afternoon to meet the daughter he never knew he had. Do you want to go, or shall I?”
Piper
I slip out into the night once Zak and Quinn are asleep. Nothing could stop me; the word forbidden holds no meaning, not to me.
Without thinking about it very much, I’ve skirted around these ruins ever since we got here. I mean, it is easier to walk around them than across, but I’ve avoided touching any bit of them, without really wondering why.
The ruins outline a small house; where we live now was once the barn behind it. The rundown outbuildings and the remains of fences here and there all say that once this was a farm—a small one, but a farm.
Quinn called the ruins the burning place.
I first had the dream—what I thought was a dream, or a hallucination from fever—when I was thirteen. I’d been ill, so very ill, but I remember Isobel wouldn’t send for a doctor. Recently I’ve wondered if it was because she knew what was wrong with me and that a doctor couldn’t help. That it would pass. She said she and her mother experienced the same thing themselves at that age.
And Quinn had the same dream.
I try to remember the details, but strangely, it is both imprinted on my memory forever and forgotten. Almost like I tried to erase it, but only managed to get rid of some of the edges.
And it was around then that I started to understand how different Mum and I were from everyone around us: how we knew things other people didn’t that we had no way of knowing, and how easy it was to make everyone agree with what we wanted. In fact, it was really only because this ability of mine didn’t work on Mum that I first realized I was different from other people—that how I interacted with them was different.
I started to want to know more. I was desperate to understand how and why we could do the things we did, and to find out what else I could do. There was a conviction inside me that this was only the beginning; there could be more, so much more. Then Mum and I started not getting along. She looked at me oddly, watched me all the time.
Why is this ground forbidden to us? There is an unease, a fear, inside me.
I step forward, over what was once a wall. I reach out with both hands, grip its stone, and fall to the ground.
I run on the moors, tangled in my skirts, tripping in haste, scratched by gorse, cut, bleeding. Chill howls hang in twilight air; the hounds are close. They hunt me like an animal, herd me to the place they would take—my home. But if they want me there, it is no sanctuary.
Gasping for breath, I bolt the door behind me and retrieve the book from the hidden place. I caress the worn cover, red as blood, the symbol of the women of my family. The source of our slight power—the twisting of words, the shaping of belief.
I take a knife and dip a feather into the most special ink—my own blood. I make myself hold the pen steady, and begin.
If you destroy me, I will return stronger and destroy you. My daughter and my daughter’s daughter, and on and on, the strongest one of each generation, will grow in power and spite. You and yours will be marked by shadow. We, the women of the black woods, will hunt you down forever until no Hamleys remain, and trap you in the hunt for all eternity.
The trees are burning. The peat of my walls will soon follow. Fear grips and twists me inside, but more, there is anger. Does that Hamley scoundrel dare take by force what he could not buy?
Even now, I could escape the flames. All the Hamleys want is to destroy the farm.
But the ending of this old life will make my last lie—my last words, written in blood in the Book of Lies—the most powerful of all. My death will twist my lies into a curse. The Hamleys will be destroyed and imprisoned with the hunt in the wood where my ancestors were put on trial. And the hunt will run on the moors when we call it.
I take off my bracelet and hide it and the book in the secret place, replace the stones to save them from the flames. My daughter will know where to find them.
It is some time later when I come to, crumpled on the ground. My face is covered with tears, my body twisted with pain and fear.
And anger.
She was alone, an old woman alone. But she wasn’t defenseless—oh no. She was a wise woman, an enchantress, the keeper of the book.
I’ve long known that the power to shape belief is in my blood: when I twist the truth, listeners believe. But the Book of Lies will give me so much more: lies written in it become true to all.
If I have the book, any lies I write in it will become the truth. This is my inheritance.
She wrote the curse of the Hamleys in the book. With her death, it came true, like she knew it would. It has plagued the Hamleys every generation since then. That box Quinn found in Gran’s reading room with all the notes, drawings, and photos shows what ha
s happened to them over the years, generation after generation. And as we’ve grown in power—each generation stronger than the last—their suffering has continued. And so it must: one comes with the other, forever entwined.
It will continue.
My family are the women of the black woods. Now I understand why Mum wouldn’t change her name. How could she, when the Blackwood name defines everything about who we are?
Now, too, I know our enemy. In the photographs in Gran’s box, the Hamleys were all marked by shadow. I saw this without knowing what it meant.
And now, at last, I understand what is imprisoned in the black woods of Wistman’s Wood—why the hounds of the hunt were unleashed when I went back there at night, when I felt the hunger in the trees again and called it forth.
That was no dream. When Quinn said earlier that we were spirit traveling all those years ago, I understood. Like a puzzle suddenly clicking together, making the hidden pattern obvious.
The dreams that were not dreams: I called the hunt. Me, not Quinn. I commanded it.
Now I’m shaking. The fear of those campers when we ripped down their tent; their cries echo in my ears. Their blood: we feasted on their blood. All because of me.
What am I?
I’m freaked out, horrified: a scream is building. Panic is taking over. I’m going back; I’m remembering. Other times, other blood . . .
Be still. All that you have done has brought you to this moment.
I breathe: in, out, in, out. These were things that must be. They show that I am the strongest of our generation. I cannot deny this part of me.
Everything I’ve done to get here has led to this moment of truth.
The book must be mine.
And I can use it to fix things, can’t I? I can make things better and forget what came before.
My beautiful Zak. I tell him that he loves me, and he believes me. Of course he does; he has no choice. But that isn’t the same as him truly loving me, is it? If it were, he could never have kissed Quinn.
